


The Hours are Breathing, Faint and Low

by beanfield



Series: The Thoughts of Hollow Men [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: A story told through the POV of a psychopath, Angst, Character Study, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, I'm kind of just thinking of these tags as I go along, I'm not really sure what "OTHER" counts as in terms of relationships..., Jealous Jim is a violent Jim, M/M, Moriarty is not actually Moriarty, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Torture, but then again when is MorMor ever happy or heartwarming, if you want happy or heartwarming this is not what you should read, if you want., inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The City in the Sea", mormor, prologue to The Thoughts of Hollow Men, read that first, there are spoilers for The Thoughts of Hollow Men, two baby psychopaths awwwww so cute and violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanfield/pseuds/beanfield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The second of the "Poe-logues", or the accompanying works to go with my Thoughts of Hollow Men series. This one is for Jim Moriarty, and it is inspired by and references Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "The City in the Sea". <strong> Make sure you read that fic before you read the Poe-logues. As always, here there be spoilers. </strong></p><p> </p><p>  <em> "Sebastian Moran will ask him while smoking a cigarette, <em> “Just what is it that you want, Mr Moriarty?” </em> And he doesn’t know. He truly does not care what the dividends are; wealth, real estate, power, sex, infamy—he has all of those, and feels nothing still. There is no fulfilment in those things. And yes, it’s true, he does enjoy the finer parts of life, crushing bones, hearts, minds, but he doesn’t want anything that he can name." </em></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hours are Breathing, Faint and Low

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, hello! Here is the second of the Poe-logues. The first is Lestrade's, based off of "Annabel Lee", and is called "All the Night-Tide" (note: it is _not_ Mystrade, but both bits of the now-complete epilogue [Ch. 10 of "The Thoughts of Hollow Men"] and Mycroft's as-yet unwritten Poe-logue will contain that relationship...I think.)
> 
> This is MorMor, as referenced in various chapters in TTofHM. **Warnings for violence (obviously), drug use, non-con/rape, not a lot of dialogue and a lot of monologuing, a twin sister, abuse of animals, repetition of ideas and motifs, swearing, Irishmen, major and minor character deaths, Jim going off the deep end, literary references, Edgar Allen Poe, a reference to Hamlet and...flooding, I guess?**
> 
> Unbetaed. Reviews, kudos, comments of a _constructive_ nature—all are welcome and appreciated. I own nothing except some tea and a Tumblr. Find me at spookybellbeanie until November 1, and after that, I plan to go back to being tinibellbeanie.

He is a child and he dreams of kingdoms, vast and wide, spreading farther than his dark eyes can see—beyond his fingertips, and green hills and sooty city streets and beyond his windowsill.

They share a room, he and Annie, and her delicate dolls are lined up in front of the window and blocks the sunlight with their porcelain faces—so static, so stationary, so _dull_.

He smashes them, every one, even the ones that do not block his view of the lands that would one day be his.

Annie does not cry when she sees what he’s done, only scoops up the shards and destroyed dresses that littered their room. He doesn’t see what she does with them, until he finds sharp, tiny pieces in his oatmeal the next morning and they share a knowing smile.

They do not know how to love each other, or anyone, for that matter, but they are young with clean faces and nice shoes and dark hair and wide eyes, so no one gives them more than a passing smile as they would walk by hand-in-hand making small chaos.

Annie and Jim are five-years-old when they kill the birds they found in the nest near their bedroom window, and Jim swears he’s never seen Annie happier than the moment he watches her face light up as the sharp stone darts the blood and skull and brain across the big rock in their backyard.

In that moment, he is happy too, or as near a thing as he can manage.

School forces them to be separated. They are in a Catholic school down the road from their home, near the university in which their mother and father both teach. Crisp white shirts, plaid tartan skirts, green ties and black pants and shined shoes—he _hates_ it. They were usually with each other every moment of every day, even sleeping in the same bed curled up around each other, feeding off the other’s thoughts and taking cues as though they shared one mind. This, this, _this_ —this school, it is all antiquated, erudite and methodical, suffocating him with its dullness and symmetry.

It is there, in primary school, after he learns about wars for the first time—a sanitized version of bloodshed and human massacre—that he first dreams about being a king, a messiah, a herald, a general, a god. And why shouldn’t he? “ _Why shouldn’t I_?” has been the question at the forefront of his mind for almost all his life.

_Why shouldn’t I be king?_

_Why shouldn’t I hurt the bird?_

_Why shouldn’t I kill Carl Powers?_

_Why shouldn’t I dominate and entrap others, play them like flies on a web, make them dance on strings like puppets and destroy them in an inferno and watch them crack like pottery on high heat, watch as their paint flicks away and they melt and combust and char—why_ shouldn’t _he do that, if that’s all I’ve ever wanted?_

_Why shouldn’t I just kill myself now, Sebastian?_

_Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I? Tell me truly, Father/Miss/Sebby/Mr Holmes, why shouldn’t I make the world my plaything?_

People are fickle, and petty, and he is not one of them. Man delights not him, nor does anything, not _really_. There’s just so little left for a man who is made of hellfire of that calibre. He burns in the distance, fast and hot, scorching everything in his path, even himself, until there’s nothing left to sustain him; so, like fire without oxygen, he dies.

But that is not now. Now, he is young, ablaze with potential and madness before him, and Annie is burning with him, just the same.

In the 80s, with pseudo-science abound and psychiatric diagnoses becoming more and more widespread, they (those people who granted themselves power to do so) say that the Foley twins have something called “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder”. Not too much later, they declare them equally suffering from a vague and unspecified personality disorder. Because who is to say otherwise?

The children, Aine “Annie” Margaret and James “Jim” Richard Foley, Jr. are born in a cold month in Blanchardstown, and in that house on Sheephill Avenue, the air inside remains cold even as the seasons pass.

 

The night his father wakes them and tells them that their mother is not coming home, Jim remembers dreaming that the entire world was under the sea, and he could breathe like a fish and no one else, _no one else_ , had that sort of power. He watched so calmly, so pleasantly in the ocean light, as the others, inferior and unfit for this new paradise, scratched at their throats, desperate for air. He watched his mother grasp at sea creatures in vain attempts to surface, and their father with his big hands found nothing to propel him upwards to the air because there was no air. This was his utopia, only for him.

Even Annie, strong, clever, _vicious_ Annie, eventually became blue-lipped and cold and immobile under the water, and he wrapped her in a bed of seaweed and the scavenging fish ate at her body and flesh until only her bones remained in her kelp coffin.

He was alone with corpses and the dead, and with his subjects he makes his kingdom in submerged cities spanning the globe. He stacks coral and carves rock with nimble fingers and commands skeletons, and in one night, he becomes not just a boy, but a _king_.

He wakes up to a tidal wave, his world sloshing back and forth like water in a bath, as his father shakes him awake brusquely. His eyes are as dark as his hair and the shadows from the tree outside cast circles under his eyes, and just for a moment, he looks dead, or at least supernatural.

“Jimmy, Annie, there’s—there’s been…” He pauses, and both Annie and Jim can tell that he’s drunk. His hands shake. His brow sweats and his eyes dart back and forth minutely; he’s unable to focus on either of his children’s faces. “There’s been…an accident.”

When the gentlemen from the precinct down the street come to tell them that their mother has died, Annie and Jim both share a look that says, _“We know, but we are expected not to know, so it is time to pretend”_ , a look that they are very familiar with and have practiced for many years.

So they play at being normal for the day, following the lead of their father who puts his arms around them and weeps, and they cry too for added effect, convincing the constables that they’re a normal, grieving family with normal, empathetic children and normal, nonviolent lives.

They carry the secret with them, in small, furtive smiles shared between Annie and Jim and hidden in the bags under their father’s eyes, because Professor Foley knows that within the dark melancholy waters that fill his children’s minds, they are far smarter than he, far cleverer and infinitely more dangerous.

And so Professor Beatrice Moriarty, is struck down with extreme prejudice as she crosses a street, shopping for her lovely, _normal_ family, all because she knows that they were not lovely or _normal_. Because she carries in her throat and lungs and mind a secret that she cannot hope to keep. Because she had discovered the littered corpses of birds and animals dissected and buried in the backyard under bushes, and found her husband’s cache of illegally manufactured weapons used to protect his on-the-side industry selling weapons to the supposedly defunct IRA.

It is not from his father that he learns his brutality. It is from his mother. His mother, so vast in her capacity for love and cruelty—because he cannot tell the difference between the two; in his mind, there _is_ no difference. He does not know how to love his mother, but he recognizes her presence in his life as a largely positive, protective one. Even if her two small children have no capacity for human love, or any humanity whatsoever, she loved them as best she could. They were borne from her; she’d carried them for nine long, strenuous, shattering months, and when she saw those two babies, howling and tearing apart the air with their cries, they killed her eight years too soon. With their thin, dark hair and the black eyes belying clever mercilessness beyond the scope of her oh-so-human understanding, the only word she could think of to describe her children—only to her private mind—was _heartbreaking_.

Her loss, he recognizes, is not of a mother, but of a figurehead. She was a stabilizing force who kept the barest morality within them. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not kill.

_Why shouldn’t I?_

There has been an answer beforehand, even if it is unspoken, a pillar of shaking morality in their small, cold home. After her death, in her absence, there is none.

           

He kills Carl Powers when the other boy is fifteen and they are eleven and the botulinum toxin, admittedly, is Annie’s idea. He tries to make her smile. She tries to make him suffer, and they think for weeks what would be most horrifying, and then it dawns on him. Jim is proud of himself when he thinks of it, because what terror could be greater than a swimmer drowning in the world Powers had once tamed?

As they watch the news drifting across the television crawl and the newspaper headlines, Jim thought of his dream years ago, and he realizes: _this is the start of my city_.

             

They stand at the sidelines as their father’s so-called operation falls to the floor. The Garda march him out in front of journalists, ready for tomorrow morning’s paper to fly off the shelves with headlines of _LOCAL PROFESSOR ARRESTED ON WEAPONS CHARGES_ and _IRA SUPPLIED BY ARMS DEALING LECTURER,_ and maybe, in the background, you can see the faces of two wan, thin children staring out the window completely devoid of any emotion at all.

Supposedly, their aunt is supposed to take custody of them until they turn eighteen, but by fourteen, between Annie’s brute, efficient viciousness and Jim’s strategy, they have more than enough money to share a flat in Dublin, far enough from their aunt’s home in Galway to start accruing contacts and establishing themselves as _minor_ players on the criminal stage.

They aren’t known, per se, but their presence is visible more and more with every small heist. Since they organized the murder of Carl Powers, they stop pretending for emotionality altogether. They kill with efficiency, like showmen, like actors in a play, performing exactly the lines necessary to show their audiences that they are _liars_ ; they can be anyone at any given time.

The heists are simple, often. It is less about profit and more about the chaos the absence of money causes. _Taking_ what isn’t theirs to take. _Breaking_ small worlds apart without concern for the collateral.

As they grow older, they become more and more competent, and more codependent. Never any faces, or names, but they hire men in suits to do face-to-face interactions as they wear hoodies on street corners and observe. They learned from an early age to be normal, and then, at the age of fifteen, they learn to be invisible.

The first time Annie is hit on in a pub, Jim wants to stab him in every inch of skin, to flay him and spread him wide open like an autopsy on the bar, gouge out his eyes, cut off his cock, trace his veins with a dull knife—he does not love his sister. Not in the slightest. He recognizes her merits as a business partner, nothing more, and sees value in having someone nearby who thinks in the same base, savage way he does.

He does not love his sister.

That does not mean he is not jealous.

Annie flirts with the man, at least thirty to her slightly-mature-looking sixteen, and when he takes her into the dank alley behind the pub, Jim follows and drives a knife into the back of his neck, and she smiles, pupils blown wide and her lips red from kissing and blood and lipstick.

Jim kills her just before their eighteenth birthday, when her desire for sex and sadism outweigh his plans for his business. His city has no need for a queen, he decides. He has no need for her. They, _everyone_ , will come into his kingdom eventually.

If one were to look, what’s left of her body is weighed down by rocks and gold somewhere in Galway Bay, strangled by pale, thin fingers wrapping purple rings around her graceful neck. Her lips part as she dies, her eyes wide but not panicked, a silent prayer escaping from her lips: _thank you, Lord_ , and he knows that she believes in no other god but him, and he believes in none other than her.

Man does not often kill gods. The boy called Jim Foley dies the day he kills his other half, and becomes something more-than-a-man, _Moriarty_ , something infinite and powerful and faceless, something shouted to the Heavens and prayed to whilst lying in pools of blood and someone omniscient, omnipotent, even. He becomes a god the day he kills Aine “Annie” Moriarty-Foley.

He takes on business associates one-by-one after that, like photographs, handpicking them from a selection of Irish mob operatives, hitmen, ex-soldiers, bent coppers, and he kills them all exactly six months after their first face-to-face meeting. He does them the honour of killing them himself rather than paying some young junkie thousands of pounds to shank the man in a dark city lane. After the first kill, he grew bored—tries poison, but it works too slowly. He knows knives and blades, but they are messy and he hates to get his bespoke suits stained with blood of inferior beings. He knew guns, but they work too quickly, and aren’t messy _enough_. He is too small to drown or strangle a fully-grown, trained man. It doesn’t matter. It is death. Death, all the same.

He likes bombs. They are impersonal, yes, and they are quick—in the flash of a moment, life is decimated into shrapnel, deadly and widespread. But they are elegant, in a way. The blast patterns can be traced; burns can be drawn in ash and rubble.

Bombs are loud, too. Make a statement. Make some noise. Make a _name_. Not just the child of a dead professor and an arms dealer. Now, a whisper on the lips of every criminal from Belfast to Edinburgh, spreading outward onto the Continent and into Asia. He’s not yet made his mark on the Americas yet, but he is young, and he is learning. A quick learner, at that.

He doesn’t hear the name Sherlock Holmes for a long while. It is Mycroft Holmes, the elder brother, who garners his attention first. Mycroft Holmes, grown and preened and pruned for a life of secrecy and bureaucratic power. So he watches, and documents and stalks Mr Holmes for months, years; he creates elaborate situations that result in chess-like wars between the two of them, driving each other toward the brink, driving each other insane ( _he loves insanity so much more than the alternative; it is chaos within a person_ )—

Jim doesn’t yet know people well enough to realize that it is not patriotism that drives Mycroft Holmes, but something else entirely, and that something makes them far more alike than not.

Mycroft Holmes cannot be driven insane—he cannot play wicked, fantastic mindgames with the man and force him towards madness, because that implies anything other than mechanical rationality. Jim is not a rational man, and that is what skews him toward the unpredictable, the unknowable. That does not faze Mr Holmes in the slightest; he is not interested in what is unknowable, because he works in the intelligence business. He wants what is secret, what can be dragged out of men with temptation or fear, not what can’t be answered at all.

 _Sherlock_ Holmes, though, just a boy, really, a blip in a file about a not-so-minor bureaucrat, _he_ isn’t just interested in the unknowable, he’s driven towards it. The unknown is his mainsail, his _raison-d’être,_ and not only that; Sherlock Holmes _fears_ the truly unknowable answers.

But he is not important. He is a junkie, probably doomed to a death before the age of thirty, taken seriously by no one in any position of authority, not even his brother, and certainly not Jim Moriarty. Not yet, of course, but someday. 

Sebastian Moran will ask him while smoking a cigarette, _“Just what is it that you want, Mr Moriarty?”_ And he doesn’t know. He truly does not care what the dividends are; wealth, real estate, power, sex, infamy—he _has_ all of those, and feels nothing still. There is no fulfilment in those things. And yes, it’s true, he does enjoy the finer parts of life, crushing bones, hearts, minds, but he doesn’t want anything that he can name.

 _Something new,_ he thinks, trying to ignore the recurring tedium of his view from the highest level of the criminal underworld. But Sebastian is dull, and stupid, and charming and handsome and strong and merciless, so he would not understand what “new” could even mean.

He knows of the colonel’s dishonourable discharge from the moment it is signed, sealed and delivered. He’s been following the misdeeds of the man for months, nothing untoward—obstinacy, refusal to follow orders, drug smuggling. The crimes are dull but the shots are gorgeous, and Jim’s been lacking of a reliable underling for quite some time.

There are plenty of talented snipers in the world, but there is only one Colonel Moran, a gentleman of fine tastes and finer aim, and Jim wants to _devour_ him.

Six months out of service, Moran is sleeping in alleyways, grovelling, whoring himself just to get another hit, waiting to get that burst of euphoria followed by absence.

Jim has already taken control of portions of the London heroin trade just for this purpose—he does away with Moran’s usual dealer, makes him weak, and desperate, and drags him out of an alley, pulls him into the car and lets him shoot up as much as he likes, letting him ride it out in one of Jim’s more utilitarian flats in a nearby neighbourhood. It’s not glamorous, but it’s functional, and the sex is rough and violent and bloody for the two days it takes for Moran to return to a more coherent, clear-minded state. By the third day, he’s clean-shaven and clean-faced, groomed and looking like a proper gentleman, save for the deep circles under his eyes and the shaking right hand that refuses to cease.

Jim stares at the hand with great disdain, that little hint of weakness, as they sit across each other in the sleek black car heading only in circles. As Moran smokes a cigarette with his left and aches for the feel of a syringe in his hand with his trembling right, Jim Moriarty plans.

 _“Just what is it that you want, Mr Moriarty?”_ Sebastian asks, breaking the silence through the smoke.

 _“Everything.”_ Jim replies with teeth bared like fangs, because the truth is too complicated for words. How can he explain to such a drug-addled, lesser mind that he wants to make all of the Western world his city, his kingdom, drown it in lurid waters and rule over the bodies of victims and the supplicating and captive subjects alike, conquer them with fire and silence. He wants to not only _become_ the Devil himself, but be more than him—Lucifer, Satan, whomever—he shall come to revere and worship the man of death and gunfire and cunning, the man, Jim Moriarty, whose childhood terrors and childhood ambitions were one and the same, the man who controls everything on land and under the sea, and then, then, _then—_

Then, he shall plunder, he shall destroy, he shall burn it all to ash, and then he will die, and he will be so very, very pleased.

Perhaps he will even be happy.

 

Sebby is clean, and Jim is bored. He has sent case upon case under the nose of Sherlock Holmes, _consulting detective,_ and now, he’s beginning to wonder if the man even truly is capable of piecing it together. Perhaps he’s been overestimating Holmes this whole time, but wouldn’t that be a tragedy, then?

So he takes a job tinkering with technology in the upper floors of St Bart’s, watches from a distance the comings-and-goings of Mr Sherlock Holmes and the ubiquitous Dr Watson. And in his efforts to manhandle and manipulate Holmes into the game, he comes across sweet, kindhearted Molly Hooper. What a catch she was, to be honest—and the nostalgia is bittersweet on his tongue as he kisses her, just briefly, feigning shyness and drawing back quickly, cutting it short to mask his overwhelming hunger.

The first time he indulges in sex, such an animalistic, vile, base practice, he is barely 18 and had only just killed his sister. It is to a woman who is 22, slightly drunk, walking home alone in a supposedly-reputable area, simple, doelike prey. He does not want _her_ , but he does want to consume her, destroy her, and he desires everything she possesses and breaks her apart. He drugs her afterward, not before, because he wants to feel her stop struggling beneath his arms, relent to her fate, and he drags her into a car and watches her useless, limp body stare with bloodshot, wide eyes into the leather of the backseat. The driver does not make a sound; he is paid to look the other way, and keep his eyes on the road and not what goes on behind him.

The driver is left idling outside one of his warehouses where he knows a competitor in the drug market stashes one of his many cocaine stores. This will not take long. It’s efficient, after all—she can’t be allowed to live, and he can’t have competitors disrupting his trade. All a part of good business. Kings must kill off those who threaten the kingdom.

He plants the bombs under and around her, sets the timer for about an hour after he plans to leave, at which point she will be conscious but mostly immobilized. The last consummation of that night’s escapades. In fire and brimstone, she'll be torn apart, her body and mind and bones broken in one beautiful blast.

He can see the explosion across town from his penthouse window, and he smiles. He thinks, perhaps, he will do this again tomorrow. Same routine, same style. Make London think there’s a serial killer afoot, _that will get_ somebody’s _attention._

Sherlock Holmes is nobody, not yet, only a drug-addled Cambridge dropout who had been cut off from his bureaucratic brother, and Jim does not care about him. Just the next assassination, the next heist, the next million pounds, the next woman or man used, empty and debased, and left for dead somewhere anonymous.

           

Now, as he pretends to be infatuated with a fucking _coroner_ , for God’s sake, he remembers that first, unnamed woman, blown to tiny, beautiful bits in a Camden warehouse. Molly Hooper looks so much like her—same petite frame, thin legs and arms with pale lips and bright, hopeful eyes. She’d beg if he made her, he knows. She’d beg for mercy, beg to be released, beg for her pathetic little life. She’d cry out for help (maybe for Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, and that would be just fucking _delicious_ ), but no, he has to play it nice, play it _good_ , play it gay as Jim from I.T.

This Jim is not real. This Jim wears lime green pants and V-necks and leaves lingering touches on Molly’s back that mean nothing but leaves damning phone numbers under Petri dishes that mean everything, and that’s the point.

He would love to torment her, but he has a mission, and single-minded focus often produces results.

Jim cannot possess Molly Hooper in the way that he most wants to, so he waits, goes home and observes the land that is _his_ city, fucks Seb violently, takes out his rage through him and watches as, through the transitive property, Sebby thrashes an informant until his brain is bleeding out his ears, or so it seems, and they dump him in the Thames and watch as the body sinks into the murky green-brown waters and presumably floats with the current towards the sea.

This is his favourite time of night. Watching blood seep into the Thames with the fog and the stars and the moon above them, next to Sebastian who is trying to clean the blood from his fingernails, and there’s no one else, just Jim, because Sebastian isn’t actually a person, not anymore, he doesn’t own anything, Jim _owns_ the man and all that he is and all that he ever will be, his past and his future and all the bullets in his rifle, controls him; Sebastian is merely an extension of the man known as Jim Moriarty, a face that is controlled by a whisper of a name.

Jim did not know how to love Annie, and he does not love Sebastian, he doesn’t think, and he does not love Sherlock Holmes, but the consulting detective fascinates him and he knows that makes Seb jealous for oh-so-human reasons. He knows that Sebastian does not approve of the way Jim spends his particularly boring nights attacking innocent men and women on the street and disposing of them, but he doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t actually have a voice or an opinion, just a trigger finger. It makes sense. Sebastian was born and raised a gentleman and spent his life in the service; he was raised to respect others, especially women, but not necessarily human life or beating hearts. Still, they are supposed to be innocents, and so he never accompanies Jim on his late-night escapades or help dispose of the bodies.

Sex is easy to find, but that feeling of complete and utter submission, resignation, within the other person, _that_ is what he craves, and he doesn’t expect Sebastian to understand unless he’s the one being dominated. He doesn’t seem to mind, or notice. Sebastian doesn’t care for his body at all, it seems, and the only thrill he gets out of life is working for Jim.

Jim knows that Sebastian feels something more human than Jim could ever know, and he doesn’t want to deal with the repercussions of that fact, so he does not bother with the facts and instead aims to tear his sniper apart from the inside out. And after, in a post-coital haze, Jim resolves to kill Sebastian sometime, sometime soon, but not yet. Now, he’s still useful.

There are other snipers in the world, and plenty who would fuck and shoot and intimidate and guard and remain silent just as well as Sebastian Moran can, but they are not Sebastian Moran, so Jim Moriarty does not care.

           

Jim has Sebastian collect him from the rooftop exactly ten minutes after Sherlock Holmes takes the plunge off the top of Bart’s, after he’s watched John Watson crumple in the arms of a stranger at the sight of his best friend’s broken body. It had to be precise, it had to be so very skilled, and the wound bleeds all over Sebastian’s coat and the leather of the car’s backseat—head wounds _do_ bleed a lot, after all, but it’s all part of the act.

With Annie, he had learned to be invisible. With Sebastian, he learned to be human, or at least, pretend that he was close to it. He pretended he was Richard Brook, which was easier than pretending he was gay Jim from I.T., because the game was so much more fun. He hasn’t been this thrilled in _years_ , since he first assaulted that one woman when he was 18, or when he killed Annie. Over twelve years since he’s felt so alive, and he’s supposed to be _dead._

“ _What were you thinking?_ ” Sebastian is shouting, and the head injury and resultant painkillers are making his words sound somewhat Greek and rather shrill and there’s a halo around Sebastian’s head and Jim glares at it, and him, because he just wants to be asleep and rather than the recipient of particularly emphatic and vociferous scolding from an underling.

“Oh, come off it, Seb. I knew what I was doing. I had my mission, and you had yours.” He tries to sound flippant but his efforts are somewhat weakened by the slurring of his words and the trailing off of his sentence towards the end.

“You could have—you _shot_ yourself in your motherfucking _head_ , and you expected me—it was _this_ close to killing you and—what if I had taken just a bit longer and you had bled out and—”

“But I didn’t, so I don’t see why this matters. For God’s sake, Sebastian, why do you care so much? If it had been you, I would have left you there in a heartbeat.”

Sebastian doesn’t respond. Jim isn’t sure how to interpret his silence, but then again, silence is his status quo, so he mostly ignores the protracted stillness. Snipers are supposed to be quiet, after all. Wouldn’t be much use otherwise.

Jim continues—garrulousness, he could later chalk up to the drugs rather than an attempt at backtracking.

“After all, it’s not as though I see you as much more as a whore with a steady gun, I don’t see why you should care about me that much. Think about it, if I were to die, you could go become employed by some other madman, or better yet, you could just take my place and live out your days in luxury. I’m surprised you haven’t tried to have me killed yet. Most of the others were either too sycophantic to consider assassination or too weak-willed to try, and those that did weren’t much use to me anyway. Those ones I just had rooted out on the spot. Can’t have a mutinous force, after all. But you’re not a coward, and you’re not a sycophant, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t shoot me; I would, in your situation, but honestly, you’re just so _incorruptible_ , my gentlemanly colonel, like a little dog on a leash, following me about—”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Sebastian responds softly, startling Jim out of his rant. Again, he would ascribe that to the drugs. Normally, he’d just swear and hush Sebastian so he could finish having a one-way conversation about whatever had peeved him that day.

“What did you say?” This is Jim’s quiet voice, his deadly voice, not the one that is amused, but the one that is steady. This is staring down an angry tiger, and Sebastian relaxes, which only serves to irritate Jim further. “ _What did you say_?”

“Well, you wouldn’t understand, would you? Why I am the way I am. Why I do what I do—why I let _you_ do what you do.” There’s a protracted pause and Jim’s getting more uncomfortable by the minute. These fucking drugs are no good—he’ll have to ask for different ones when as soon as the goddamn nurse returns, wherever the fuck she is—

“Come on then, entertain me. Aren’t you going to answer?”

“I could answer. You wouldn’t understand, though. You can’t. That’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

He leaves. His bag stays at the foot of the bed, and Jim realises belatedly that Sebastian’s scruff around his neck and on his face seems at least four or five days old, coming up on a veritable beard.

The nurse finally fucking comes in, and receives a rather satisfying reprimand for her tardiness. It does not serve to lessen Jim’s anxiety.

 

Sebastian stays with Jim in the hospital for a week before Jim sends him off on missions again. He has his second-hand, his hand-me-down man tell him the day’s stories from all the news sources the man can find, just to keep him entertained—

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as he finishes the week_ , Jim thinks, recounting the uncomfortable conversation from the first day he awoke.

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as we finish this play_ , Jim thinks, as Sebastian reads aloud from _Julius Caesar_ , and Jim considers the role of Brutus and how the man relates to his life.

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as we kill John Watson_ , Jim thinks, as he re-enters the musty penthouse apartment, smelling of Sebastian’s aftershave and gun-cleaning solution, and not of recently laundered, dry-cleaned suits or gourmet meals or expensive cologne. 

In Jim’s absence, it became Sebastian’s home base, rather than Jim’s living quarters, his personal space.

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as I have destroyed Sherlock Holmes, as soon as I’ve burnt out his heart_ , he thinks, as he reviews video footages of men— _the same man, a man who is supposed to be dead, just like him_ —countering and counteracting the various efforts of Jim’s satellite organisations on the Continent, America and in Asia. Sherlock Holmes in Tibet, Sherlock Holmes slipping silently through the streets of Morocco, Sherlock Holmes shooting one of Jim Moriarty’s caporegimes in Russia ( _killing, he is now a murderer, just like Jim—you’re_ me _, bless you, Sherlock Holmes_ ), Sherlock Holmes establishing a bank account in Switzerland and countermanding the bank’s handle on one of Jim’s many lucrative but ultimately untraceable and useless accounts.

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as I know what he means when he said “I couldn’t understand”_ , he thinks, as he watches Sebastian organise the men to force their way into John Watson and Mary Morstan’s Weighhouse Street flat. John Watson, such a dull, unimaginative, insipid creature—so very average, and yet, and yet, he holds so much of Sherlock Holmes’ interest and love—is that why Sebastian hates him so much? Is that why Sebastian Moran hates John Watson more than Jim has ever had the capacity to hate or love anything in the world, more than boredom, more than monotony?

He can feel his hold on the world slipping through his fingers, his reality and his imagination dissecting away, being snapped apart from each other as easily as Sebastian snaps the vertebrae in Miss Mary Morstan’s neck.

It takes him all of sixteen hours to snap completely, and, as Sebastian is busy playing his violent games with John’s body, discharging his insurmountable and unfathomable rage against the doctor, Jim slips out and heads to Bart’s, his fingers vibrating with anxiety and excitement. Begging, _he loves to hear them beg_. He hopes she will live up to expectations.

Still, he knows that Sebastian will find out where he’s run off to, and he’ll disapprove, but he will not make a move to end this behaviour.

 _I’ll have him killed as soon as he tries to stop me_ , Jim thinks, as Molly Hooper’s blood seeps into his white shirt from the hole in her chest, as he pins her struggling but rapidly slackening form under him.

She does not beg Jim for her life, to let her live, not to hurt her, and it disappoints him, but Sherlock hears her sobbing into the phone, begging _him_ , the holy and all-knowing consulting detective, for help—she had known all this time, which is simply infuriating. If he had vacillated before, he is resolute in his actions and decisions now.

He leaves her unconscious on the floor of the morgue with his initials tattooed in her chest by scalpel and blood.

All wars have casualties. All wars have collateral damage. But she became a soldier when she decided to save Sherlock Holmes—this is a rebellion, a civil war, and the traitors, the _enemy_ deserves to be punished for taking up arms against the king.

_Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done._

Catholic school tartans and early morning chapel come to mind. Something biblical. Something holy. Something _apocalyptic_. He doesn’t want to orchestrate the rise of his kingdom—he does not want to be a _king_. Kings are mortal and only human. He wants to become a _god_.

_Deliver us from evil. For Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen._

Sebastian can become a saint. Saints die for their cause, are martyred for their gods, their lives made of equal parts holy piousness and violent destruction.

Upon Jim’s return from the morgue, the look of disappointment on Sebastian’s face, underneath the sweat and grime and blood, is unfathomable. This will not do, Jim thinks; his apostle cannot consider his god to be fallible. He needs to keep his followers in a sense of profound enchantment and if he doesn’t, he’ll kill them.

The look of reverence on Sebastian’s face as they watch Watson struggle with all his might against the horrors of his own mind, six attempts after the first to force him into drug-induced nightmares, that is something truly saintly.

 _I’ll have him killed when I’ve nothing left to lose_ , Jim thinks, as Watson wrestles invisible demons and he fucks Sebastian into the concrete, before they shoot the doctor and package it up neatly in a clean video, send it off for an audience of one.

Saints go to be with their gods upon their deaths. They die for the Cause. So when Sebastian is shot by Sherlock Holmes mere minutes after Sebastian shoots John Watson, Jim makes the decision to send him off with aplomb, gunpowder and rage.

Sebastian takes the shot, a shot that was directed at Jim and not the ostensibly more dangerous person in the room—Sherlock Holmes has no concern with Sebastian Moran, just a pawn, and so points his gun at the king, and fires. So a pawn is sacrificed and the king is left defenceless, so Sherlock goes to the pool of blood dying slowly on the ground and ignores Jim—he’s won, he thinks.

Jim knows he’s right.

 _I’ll have him killed when I know I’ll die too,_ Jim thinks, as he picks up Sebastian’s gun from underneath his shaking body, sings to him softly, a hymn meant only for him, and shoots him in the head with a smile, revelling in the way skull and brain matter get on his suit. When DI Lestrade’s sheep-like officers arrive with Mycroft Holmes and his men following suit, Jim is sitting with a manic smile on his face.

_His Kingdom! His Kingdom!_

These people, they are all peasants, they are his subjects, _worship_ him, _fear_ him, _praise_ him. He is crucified; dragged because he refuses to walk, by two be-suited, anonymous men who have never had a holy thought in their sanctimonious lives. And in one man, the good and bad and the worst and best, all embodied in mania and madness and genius simultaneously—

 _I am become Death, destroyer of worlds_ , he tells whoever will listen, because they should venerate him and respect him and dread his might all at once.

As he stares down the barrel of Mycroft Holmes’ gun, he cannot find words to express the depth of his excitement. Because perhaps there is a Heaven, and perhaps there is a Hell, and he will find Sebastian there. Together, they two will wreak havoc wherever they can, reign in chaos and warfare and ambition. They may be in Hell, but there they will be kings.

If hellfire consumes all that it touches, then Jim Moriarty will command the seas.

If helldogs attack him, then he will have Sebastian shoot them down like tigers.

If the Devil tries to fetter them, then they will kill the Devil and take his place.

 _Aprés moi le deluge_ , he tells Mr Holmes. Because life is only the first step in his lifelong pilgrimage, his crusade against anything inferior and any heathen that deigns to stand in his way. Because a flood is coming, a flood of Ragnarök and Judgment Day, every religion’s apocalypse in one, blood toiling in seas and dead rising from their graves, singing tales of their suffering in violence and despair, and with a bullet the dam breaks and releases hell and high water unto the earth. Because he is something extraordinary, he’s known that since he was small and first watched his twin sister kill birds in cruel and imaginative ways. Because he is something so much more than the infidels will ever be.

He was Jim Moriarty. And now, at the hour of his death, when lead fired from nitro-glycerine and cordite penetrates his skull and interrupts his last homily—

Now, now, _now_ , in this waterlogged wasteland he built for himself, he is boundless.

Sherlock Holmes wins their final chess match, but it is Jim Moriarty who ends his life the victor. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again. "Annie" Foley was a creation inspired by Jim's original EAP poem for his Poe-logue, which was the poem "For Annie". The last name "Foley" means "pirate" or "plunderer", traditionally, in Anglo-Saxon regions, derived from Ó Foghlú (Ó Foghladha, in older Irish), which seemed appropriate. I made both parents professors—his father would have been Professor Jim Foley and his mother would have been Professor Beatrice Moriarty. I like the idea of them being twins because they become foils to each other (Annie is violent and brutal and a sexual being, combatting the stereotype of the "weak female" and becoming a femme fatale, in a way, or at least, an incipient one who is cut off by the "brains" of the pair; Jim is the genius, equally vicious, but dislikes actual work—much like Mycroft dislikes "legwork". Annie is more similar to Sherlock, in that way, because she requires stimulation and activity, while Jim prefers to sit back and create plans like a chessmaster, making him more dangerous and more like Mycroft Holmes rather than Sherlock. Like Mycroft, Jim is untouchable, while Sherlock can be dominated, like Annie could be, making her weak and a liability, so she is personally executed. 
> 
> Because Annie had too much independence and was so similar _and_ so different to Jim, she had to go. But Sebastian is just brutal enough physically to be useful, but he's removed and tactical enough (snipers must be intelligent, after all, to calculate windspeeds, find trajectories and proper "nests") to still remain uninvolved. 
> 
> Okay, okay, I'll stop analyzing my own work now. Please feel free to comment/review, kudo, bookmark or whatever. I have midterms right now, so Mycroft's Poe-logue, which is scheduled to be written next, might be a while. Find me on Tumblr at spookybellbeanie (until Halloween), and then at tinibellbeanie. Love always from your ridiculous capitán.


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